Posts tagged “GDC 2018”

Welcome to Soundbyte, an audio mini-series that stimulates your ears and explores topics in the games industry. In our first episode, Pixel Picketers, we're talking about unionisation in the games industry, what some folks are doing to make it happen, and the challenges they face. Let's start by speaking to Doug Cockle, who plays Geralt in The Witcher among other roles, about his negative experiences in…

Chris Hecker has been working on SpyParty for almost a decade now and I get the impression he'd be happy perfecting it for the rest of his career. Some developers want to move from one project to the next, an internal clock ticking down and reminding them how few ideas can be realised in a lifetime, while others are better suited to exploring one design…

The awards ceremony at this year’s GDC was fun. At least, that’s what John told me from his seat in the crowd, where he saw the winners mount a stage some would consider too colourful for this planet. The Independent Games Festival Awards and subsequent Game Developer’s Choice Awards saw a range of trophy-grabbers, from indie students to adventure game veterans. Unfortunately for them, I…

♪♫ When you go to San Fraaaanciscooo, be sure to wear a lanyard with ‘Media’ inscribed on it round youuur nnnneck ♪♫ That’s what Adam, John and Brendan sang to each other as they gleefully skipped through the streets of California’s tram-infested hill city. The crew were in town for the yearly Game Developer's Conference where they spoke to developers, played games, and gambled on…

The blessed boys and girls of Valve were showing off some VR games for the upcoming Vive Pro at the Game Developers Conference last week. They were encamped near the press room in a large chamber split up into little shacks, each running a game such as the robot-avoiding comedy stealth of Budget Cuts, or the sunbathing relaxation of Vacation Simulator. I went on a…

Noita is how Spelunky looks in my dreams. It's a game in which the world is simulated down to each individual pixel, so that liquids drip, flow, splash and stain. You're tasked with travelling ever downward through a series of caverns, collecting new magical weapons and slaying beasties. That wasn't always the case though. As I learned when I sat down with the developers at…

“If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” Steve Kaplan was in GDC to take part in a roundtable discussion about the pros and cons of unionisation in the games industry. He works in the entertainment industry and had travelled from Los Angeles, where he organises unions for the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, to be the union rep in the room…

“That’s the Ancient word for ‘writer’,” says Jon Ingold, pointing to some indecipherable symbols on his business card. “What it breaks down to is ‘Person-who-speaks-without-speaking.’” Ingold is the writer for Heaven’s Vault, an upcoming sci-fi adventure from Inkle (the folks behind 80 Days and Sorcery!) You play an archaeologist investigating the remains of an ancient civilisation in an otherworldly “Nebula”. He and some others from…

A man in black scrambles through the overgrowth, looking lost. So I shoot him. Puffs of bloody air erupt from his body, but he runs on. Behind him something explodes from a stray bullet – my bulet or somebody else’s? I don’t know. But the man in black keeps moving, dodging behind some trees, over a ridge. Behind me, a wall of wobbly energy closes…

Into the Breach is one of the most perfect games I’ve ever played. It’s tactical warfare with every sliver of fat trimmed away and I’d put it up there with Chess and Invisible, Inc. in the pantheon of turn-based games. Bad North will not be entering that pantheon. Not because it doesn’t seem capable of reaching lofty heights – it absolutely does – but because…

Rad trash mammal simulator Night In The Woods scooped this year's Grand Prize during the 2018 Independent Games Festival Awards at the Game Developers Conference last night, also lifting the award for Excellence In Narrative. Baba Is You, an upcoming puzzle game about shifting words to change how parts of the levels and game work, also picked up two awards. Looking across all the winners,…

You love games. We love games. We love 2D games, 3D games, pixel games, life-like games, even slightly shonky-looking games. But what about if games looked, I don't know, even better? Like, cinematic rendering, photorealistic kind of better? Well, Nvidia are on the case, as they've just announced their brand-new, not-at-all-incomprehensible "RTX Ray-Tracing" technology at GDC 2018.

Hello from the Game Developer’s Conference, where every building comes with a blizzard-spewing air conditioner. I’ve just been to see Frostpunk, the societal survival game set in a pseudo-Victorian hellwinter, from the developers of This War of Mine. The frosty management game will support modding, they say, and there are plans for “additional scenarios”. That means both smaller, free updates and bigger packs of paid…